Michael Den Tandt:
Parliament: With new spending, Tories make pre-election claim of being prudent but not heartless
A prudent budget Jim Flaherty would approve of.
Some will characterize Finance Minister Joe Oliver’s first and controversially delayed budget as timid, lacklustre and void of surprises.
It is those things. It is also quite clever politically. This is, in effect, a Jim Flaherty budget — punctiliously moderate, pointedly cautious and carefully centrist in tone to the point of feeling, well, Liberal.
Budget 2015’s core themes, which Tory candidates are sure to highlight on the campaign trail this fall, are three: prudence, with a $1.4-billion surplus projected in 2015; security, with new money for veterans, the military and counter-terrorism; and compassion, stressing that the above has been done with a view to protecting the most vulnerable. Blue Liberal worthies such as John Manley or Frank McKenna would not have framed this much differently.
While fulfilling the core Conservative promise to balance the books before the 2015 election, Oliver’s plan is squarely aimed, as his predecessor’s blueprints were, at retaining the support of swing voters who leaned to fiscally conservative Liberal governments in the 1990s, but bolted in successive waves to the Harper Conservatives beginning in 2004.
The Grits and Dippers have already been working, and will continue to work, to cast Oliver’s plan, entitled Strong Leadership: A balanced-budget, low-tax plan for jobs, growth and security, as a sop to the rich. But they will face a considerable challenge in doing so.
For if there’s an identifiable group of vulnerable citizens — aboriginals being the glaring exception — for whom some budgetary allowance has not been made, it’s not immediately obvious who they are. There’s help for seniors grappling with home renovations, students aspiring to get through college or university, for providers of social housing, sufferers of autism and the visually impaired.
There may as well be a stamp across page one of the budget book: We are responsible, but not heartless!
The object, clearly, is to take the sting out of opposition attacks on the government’s signature income-splitting tax cut, worth about $2 billion a year, which the C.D. Howe Institute and others have said will benefit only 15 per cent of Canadian families. Indeed, though incomesplitting remains hugely important in the Conservatives’ fiscal and tax plans in terms of cost, the phrase income-splitting did not figure a single time in Oliver’s speech. He referred to the measure as the family tax cut, and only in passing.
The budget contains the now customary grab-bag of gewgaws and baubles for manufacturers and industry, the forelock-tugging to innovation and research and the apparently obligatory set of measures aimed at Environmental Issues That Do Not Include Climate Change: species at risk, fisheries, protected lands and the like.
None of this is remotely surprising or different from what the Conservatives have offered before — or, for that matter, particularly different from any typical balanced budget of the Jean Chretien-Paul Martin Liberalgovernment era.
Again, this clearly was deliberate. If Justin Trudeau intends to steal a march on the Conservatives by appropriating some of their more centrist economic policies, then they can do the very same to him, by hearkening back to the Liberal themes of the 1990s: fiscal prudence, trade, innovation, education.
To make any of this feasible, the dollar amounts of new spending were kept relatively small. Again in the Flaherty tradition, commitments are backend-loaded, thus boosting their headline-grabbing power in the present while amortizing the bill well into the future. Even the $11.8-billion increase in defence spending, the largest tranche of new money allotted, is layered out over a decade.
What the Conservatives can crow about, rightly, is that they kept core promises made in the 2011 campaign, tied to a balanced budget, including a doubling of the allowable contribution to a tax-free savings account to $10,000. Expect the phrase, “Promise made, promise kept,” to figure prominently in Tory messaging between now and October, and in the fall campaign itself.
The most obvious holes here, to my eye, are three. The sum pledged to improving First Nations Education, $200 million over five years, is so inadequate, relative to the scale of the underfunding, as to be insulting. This budget again ignores climate change, but for a single brief reference, and the growing need to phase out supply management in dairy is not even addressed, making a mockery of any federal consumer-first agenda. How this squeaks by, with Trans-Pacific Partnership talks on the boil, is a mystery.
But the reality is that, the gaps in such areas notwithstanding, the Conservatives are not vulnerable politically in any of them. Viewed as a political platform, this document bolsters key areas of vulnerability, and closes some important chinks in the government’s armour. By that standard it is a success. Flaherty, one suspects, would have approved.